Dr. Nika Spaulding

Dr. Kay Daigle

Dr. Nika Spaulding makes the complex simple for everyday people. In this episode she joins Dr. Kay Daigle to discuss the first booklet in her series Theology in 10. Her purpose is to help us all easily understand theological issues. Her first booklet tackles the topic of the Trinity. It’s hard to grasp, but Nika finds a way to simplify it so that all believers not only understand it but also apply this truth in real life.

Don’t miss Nika’s easy explanation of the series and this topic. If you want to dig deeper into understanding the Trinity, consider ordering one of the resources that Nika suggests below.

This episode is available on video as well.

00:20 Introductions

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. I’m here today with Nika Spaulding. Welcome, Nika.

Nika >> Thanks, Kay.

Kay >> And welcome to all of you out there. We’re so glad that you joined us for this conversation. We’re going to be talking about theology for everyday people. And let me tell you just a little bit about Nika, why she is an expert in theology. She has a DMin in New Testament. And she also has a master’s of theology from DTS. And she is a storyteller and a theologian. And I’ve heard her described herself as actually a Bible nerd.

Nika >> That’s so true. Yeah.

Kay >> So those are things that I know about Nika. And she has been working on a new project, Theology in 10. I’ll let her tell you about that. But it is that theology for everyday people that she has come up with. And so I really want to talk about all those things. And I could but first, I really thought, particularly since we’re talking about you as the theologian and theology, that maybe some people don’t know anything really about you.

So tell us a little bit about your background and why you got into theology in the first place.

Nika >> Yeah, it’s such a good question. So I didn’t grow up in the church, so the fact that I’m like now a Doctor of Ministry in the New Testament is like more shocking maybe to me than anyone. So I actually have a science background. I grew up in a non-Christian home. My parents are believers now. I grew up in a great home. I loved my family.

But theology was this really foreign thing to me! This like I knew that books existed. I knew that theology was like a discipline, like zoology, which is my bachelor’s degree or like psychology or all of these things. But I got to college and I thought for sure I was going to be a doctor because I love science and I wanted to help people.

But to this day, if I see blood or vomit, I get weak in the knees and I pass out like till this day. And I knew this even going into college. So. Oh, yeah, everybody with common sense kept going “Maybe you should pick a different career,” but I didn’t have enough common sense at 18.

So eventually I realized, Okay, I’m not going to make it through medical school. So now what? And that started me on a journey of trying to figure out what is it that God was calling me to do. At that point, I was walking with the Lord faithfully. So it’s sort of like, “Okay, God, I guess you get a vote. I guess if I had been asking all along, maybe, maybe the fact that I can’t handle those things was your way of saying to me, That’s not what I have for you.”

So I worked at a residential care facility for troubled teens, and that really is what started me on the trajectory because these kids, they had faced, I mean, so much trauma and so much chaos in their lives. And they asked really important questions about the Lord. And I remember I couldn’t answer the questions. And I was like, well, that’s fine, because I hadn’t been in the church that long.

So that’s normal that I wouldn’t be able to answer them. But I would ask other folks who’d been in the church a long time, and either they would be really dismissive of these kiddos’ questions or they just didn’t know. And I thought, I think these questions demand an answer. And they didn’t seem like beyond my, you know, some questions people ask.

And I’m like, yeah, we’ve been asking that for 2000 years. Like, no one’s quite figured that one out. But some of these questions, I thought, “No, I think there’s probably an answer to that.” So that started me down the path of going to seminary. And I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this. I always said I went to DTS because it was warmer than the other seminaries and I didn’t want to be cold, and I always said I would just drop out when I got all my questions answered.

And then if you go to seminary, you realize all you do is leave with more questions than answers. And I fell in love. I fell in love with the study of theology. I—this whole field that I had never even dipped my toes in. Once I got to seminary, I was hooked.

And so pretty quickly on, I thought, I want to do this the rest of my life. I want to pursue the Lord with my mind. And I want to make that available to everyone else.

I’ve always been that person that can take really complex things and make them simple. And when I got to seminary, I thought, everyone needs to know what I know now. How do I make it available to everyone?

And so was it similar for you when you got there? Did you think, Oh, I have a lot of people that need to know this stuff?

Kay >> Oh, absolutely. In fact, I talked two or three of my friends and to go on to seminary. Oh.

Nika >> I love that. Yeah.

Kay >> Because they were also Bible teachers and I was learning so much and, you know, they were kind of like me. We kind of felt like we knew quite a bit, but not really. Yeah, not really.

Nika >> You think you do. And then you read and you go, Huh? So much I don’t know. I still feel that way. I mean, I’m finishing with a Doctorate of Ministry and going, I there’s so much, there’s too many, but I’m surrounded by books. As you can see, there are thousands more I want to read. And one of my favorite stories, actually, during COVID, one of my roommates was living with me, of course, at the time.

And she would see me preparing sermons for Sunday morning. And one day she came in, she goes, “You know, it’s really interesting that we’re both working from home during COVID because I really never knew what you did with your day.” And I go, “What do you mean?” And she goes, “Well, I didn’t know you prepared sermons.”

And I thought, “You think I just walk up there on Sunday and just, like, open the Bible and like, a sermon comes out?

She goes, “Well, yeah, that’s what I thought you learned in seminary.”

And I thought, “Oh, no, no. You learn how to prepare a sermon, you know? You know?”

And so she goes, “Yeah, it turns out you work pretty hard on those.”

And so it was a very funny moment for us as roommates where she’s like, “I had no idea how much you had to study to do what you do.”

But it was seminary was phenomenal. It’s part of why I kept going. I’m not even sure I’m done. I’m not sure I won’t go back for more school at some point because Bible Nerd is a very accurate descriptor of who I am.

Kay >> I thought it was too. That stuck with me ever since I heard you say it. So I thought I ought to use that just for you today because it’s so apt to who you are.

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> Well, let’s move on to this latest project that you’ve taken on–the Theology in 10 series. It’s not quite a series yet. But you plan it to be a series, don’t you?

Nika >> I do, yeah. That’s the big hope. And I’m starting to work on the second one, so it’ll be a series. We’ll say that, Lord willing. So yeah, this is one of those projects that for years I’ve been teaching theology, thinking about theology, describing theology. And as you do that, you tinker over time, you kind of figure out like phrases that you use that you come back to often.

And for me, I always think to myself, “Okay, can I take this really big concept let’s say the Trinity, which is what my first booklets on, can I make it to where my mom, who has no seminary background, she, you know, is bright as can be but has no reference point for theology other than what I’m going to tell her in this moment. Can I explain to her the Trinity in a way that I’m not going to bore her, I won’t lose her, I won’t go over her head and that there’s a so what?”

And over the years, I found like that’s kind of how I’ve built my classes.

So could I create a ten page booklet where I take really complex subjects like the Trinity, where you and I spent a semester learning and we spent a whole semester learning and training? Can I boil a whole semester down into ten pages? And it turns out I can. And this is one of my unique ways of how I think I see the world is I make the complex simple.

And so that’s what started the idea for this and it was really fun making the first one.

Kay >> Well, I think you’ve done a great job with this first one. In fact I’ll put it up so that people can see it. And why did you choose “Ten”?

Nika >> Yeah. Part of my doctoral work whenever I was doing my dissertation prior to landing on what I chose, I started looking at reading habits of just adults and I looked at reading habits and the ancient world because they’re very different than literacy rates and all that.

And I came across this data point and it stuck with me and I kept looking at it: the average American adult, their attention span for reading is ten pages. So I thought, Okay, so there was a part of me like, like this irksome part of me that thought, well, this is our problem. People need to read more.

But there’s a thing in sociology called desire paths. And what they mean is let’s say you and me, that we’re on this campus and we’ve got to go from one building to the other. And they have put a sidewalk up, but it’s kind of out of the way and it’s kind of longer. And there’s just like a clear path between the two buildings. What will happen is the desire for us to go just like point A to point B, we will eventually actually kill the grass between the two buildings.

And so architects and sociologists call this the desire path.

You can either fight against it and put up signs. Please don’t walk on the grass, put up you know, you know, you can try to prevent it or you can just put a path there. You can just put a little walking path because that’s the path people want to take.

So in sociology, the question always becomes, can we change this? Can we make people read a hundred pages or can I meet them at the ten pages?

And I meet moms who are getting a couple of hours sleep because they’re nursing. I meet busy folks who have long commutes. I meet, you know, some of my best friends are transplant surgeons who are lucky if they get five pages of reading a month.

And I’m going, “Okay, what about for them? You know, the nerds that are going to read 200 pages, they don’t need me. What about the folks that need something for them? Because they’re missing out on really good theology and nobody’s writing ten pages for them.”

So that was the heart behind the ten pages. Can I consolidate down into ten pages and meet folks where they’re at? And that’s why we won’t go any longer. I’m pretty committed to the ten pages, which makes me as a writer have to say, Okay, what’s absolutely essential that you need to know about this topic and how can I fit it in here?

Kay >> Well, you packed a lot in these pages. I was really very impressed that you could get this much information in ten pages. Yeah.

Nika >> Yeah. I always tell people if you can go to Starbucks and sit down with somebody and they, they go, Hey, what’s the Trinity if you can, on a napkin at Starbucks, do a decent job of defining anything, then you (1) know it, and (2) you’re able to really teach it. And most things are— I don’t know quantum physics may be I don’t know—there’s probably certain subjects that need more than that.

But a lot of things can be boiled down to these really simple things. And so yeah, the ten pages where we filled them up, that’s for sure. Every page is significant. There’s no fluff in here, but it is sufficient, I think, to teach it.

Kay >> Right and you know, I noticed, you know, you have some you have a big picture in here of helping define the Trinity and all. And we’ll talk about the Trinity in a minute. But what other elements do you have in this ten page booklet?

Nika >> Yeah, so some of them are those are my actual hand drawings, which is really fun. So one of my roommates is a graphic designer. And so on the front page, you’ll see like those are my actual initials. And then within the book, there are just you know, things that I figured out over the years, like these little graphics that can explain, you know, the Father is not the Holy Spirit who is not the Son, who is not the Father, but they all are God.

Like this is one of those things I tell people. If you can draw a triangle, you can understand the Trinity. And so there are little like hand-drawn things that one I think are visually they’re nice. It breaks up the monotony of the booklet, but they also show like, hey, there really is a simplicity here. Like I can communicate a lot in a picture. I can communicate a lot in a drawing.

So those are some of the elements we were talking before we hopped on here. There are QR codes. One of them is currently broken, but we will get it fixed, dear listener. But one of the goals of all theological instruction for me is worship. At the end of the day, I want people to know that the whole reason why we do this is so we’ll fall more in love with God and come to realize how much God loves us.

So there’s always a goal. And the goal is not to make people smarter so that they’ll pass a theology test, which, oh, that’s great. The goal is, can I convince you of the love of God?

And so since that’s the goal, then there’s a QR code for songs about the Trinity because, you know, I’m like, “Hey, I want you to respond in worship. I want you to have a moment with the Lord.” And so that’s part of the element.

And then there’s helpful charts. And then if you’ve ever heard me teach, anybody who’s ever heard me teach knows at the very end, you’re going to know when I land the plane, you can snooze. And then when I say, “And so what’s the ‘so what?’”

Everybody can perk up because I’m going to land the plane after this. So and all of them are going to end with us. So why does this matter? And so I’m taking 2000 years of theological church history data. I have a whole shelf actually. I’m pointing up because I have a whole shelf of just Trinity Books.

All of that is consolidated in ten pages but the “so what?” on the last page is this is why it’s important that we know about the Trinity in our personal lives.

And so that’s part of the goal is it’s practical, it’s helpful, it’s clear it’s nice on the eyes, and it should lead people to worship. And so all of that, the reverse engineering that goes into the book is designed to help people encounter the God of the Scriptures, the actual triune God.

Kay >> I love that. And I’m not surprised that that’s your heart, that that’s what you want people to know because I have heard you speak about that a few times.

Nika >> Yeah. It’s kind of all the same. I haven’t really changed my style at all over the years. It’s like three points and the “so what.” But, you know, they seem to work for me.

Kay >> So why did you start with the Trinity? Yeah, I found that a very in fact, when I first got your book, I thought, “She started with the Trinity?”

Nika >> Yeah. So I would always I tell people this is the whole shebang of theology. So at the end of the day, all of these subsets of theology. So theology is just the study of God. In the study of Greek word, theos, God, study of God, but there’s different subsets. So if you go to seminary, when you get your course workbook, you’re going to have like pneumatology, the study of the Spirit. You’ll have soteriology, the study of salvation, you’ll have all these “ologies.” And so Trinitarianism is one of those subsets. But for me, at the end of the day, they all fall under the subset of “Who is God?” because in order to understand salvation, you actually have to understand the Trinity. In order to understand who you are, you know, the humanities.

You cannot fully know who you are if you don’t know what it means to be the image of a Trinitarian God. And so for me (1), I like to just go for the swing for the fences. So why not the mother lode of all theology? But (2), I want this to be the bedrock. The series will unfold, the next one’s going to be the essentials of the faith.

And so we’re going to hit kind of all of them in the next one, we’ll talk about what you must believe to be a Christian and the essentials.

But here, what I wanted to do is put God at the center of it. Start with God. Everything else falls out from that. But if you even look at the way our Scriptures are formed, God is there in the beginning, before we have salvation, before we have creation, before we have humanity, before there’s any of that stuff.

And so I wanted to give God the proper preeminent place, like he comes first and then everything else is subordinate. And most people’s conceptions of the Trinity are a little off, sometimes a lot off. And so I also wanted to start with a very loving picture of God. Because if at the end of all of this, people are buying these, learning these and all of this, but their picture of God is this angry wrathful, disappointed in you God, I’m not sure how good of good news is.

Like if the good news of the gospel says we go home to God someday. But your understanding of God is he’s kind of a jerk. You know, then it’s like, well, is that good news? Like, is it good news that we’re going to spend eternity with this God?

But if I can convince you, no, God is love by nature of being triune we know he’s love. Then suddenly the gospel is more beautiful, the essentials are more beautiful. All of this stuff that comes after this is more beautiful in light of God’s love. And so I wanted to start there, and then hopefully everything else gets more beautiful as you understand in light of who God is.

Kay >> So you said that you’re always going for “so what?” And I assume that you’re going to use that in all of your booklets. However many you end up with in this series that you’ll always end with a so what— “What do I take from this?”

So what are some of the “so what’s” from the Trinity?

Nika >> Yeah, so the first big “so what” is when people talk about the Trinity, they often, depending on the background that they come from, they have one member of the Trinity they’re more familiar with. So some people grow up in in churches where God, the Father of the Old Testament is really highlighted. Those churches can sometimes focus on, for better or for worse, like sort of a fire and brimstone type of teaching.

And they mean well, I mean, judgment and wrath that’s in the Bible. You shouldn’t shy away from those passages. And then there’s folks who grow up in churches where Jesus is really highlighted. And for them, what can inevitably happen is sometimes the way they talk about the Father and the Son as if they’re two radically different people. You know, the father is the angry, wrathful Old Testament God. And then meek and meek and mild, Jesus shows up, and we kind of look the other way when he cleanses the temple. He’s just acting like his dad then.

But for the most part, he’s sweet and kind and he saves us from his father. That’s what people can end up saying. Or some people grow up in churches where the Holy Spirit’s really emphasized and the spiritual gifts are really emphasized, but they neglect the other parts of the Trinity.

When you have a full understanding of the Trinity, what that does is (1) you begin to understand all three members of the Trinity are united. They are all full functioning members of God. There’s no J.V. God, there’s no junior varsity like, well, Father, Son, and then the Holy Spirit or all of that.

And one of the questions I ask people and part of the “so what” is “Let’s say God, the Trinity shows up in a Volkswagen bus. This is how you know that you’ve grown up in different churches that have shaped your understanding. And God the Father is in the front that Jesus is in the middle seat and the Holy Spirit floats in the backseat. And God says, “You can sit in any seat you want. The front seat is open the middle, where are you going to sit?” And that doesn’t necessarily reveal a certain bias.

But if I say to you, “Is there a seat you don’t want to sit in?”

Then suddenly people go, “Ooh, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I would choose the front seat.” Or in my faith tradition, people don’t choose the front or the back seat. They all want to sit next to Jesus, which again, that’s again, that’s fine that you want to sit next to Jesus, but would you dread sitting next to the Father?

So the “so what” of the Trinity allows us to present a unified Trinity where all three members are coconspirators in saving you. All three members are coconspirators in loving you. And it opens up the ability for me to say, “God the Father loves you, God. The Son loves you. God the Holy Spirit loves you. All three of them are worthy of worship.”

And the great salvation story of our lives is that God who loves you wants to bring you home to him. Home is not a place; it’s a person. And so part of the “so what” is helping people figure out all three of those seats in the Volkswagen bus. Those are all great seats like pick, pick anyone you want, and you’re going to encounter a God of love and goodness and beauty and justice and grace and all of that.

And so that’s one of the “so what’s.”

Kay >> That’s really great. I’ve been this year I started a small group to read through the Bible together, and we’re doing it two years because the gals that I well . . . I started throwing it out to a group that I was kind of shepherding and, you know, so I knew that they all had some Bible background, but that there were probably some of them who had never read through the Bible, but also know how busy they are.

They all have little kids and all that kind of stuff. So I’m like, maybe in two years. The first person I was talking to about it, I said, maybe a two year plan would be good. So as I prayed about it and thought about it and threw that out to this group that I was going to read through in two years, if anybody wanted to join me, we would sort of connect with each other once a week by text. And then maybe every few weeks we would get together and just talk about it. It’s been really interesting. I gave them all a journal and said, “Write down every day. Just something. Just something that hits you, something that you like, something you didn’t like, something that you’re going to question about, just something that was meaningful to you, you know, what do you learn about God?”

That kind of thing. And so as we obviously began going through the Old Testament, and we got to . . .

Nika >> Name any chapter you want, there’s probably going to be some quote to be on.

Kay >> Yeah, yeah. I mean, starting some in Exodus and then got you Leviticus and Deuteronomy. I mean, by the time we got to Deuteronomy, which was just the other day, several of them said, “I just liked the God that I liked that I really wasn’t reading about here.”

Yeah. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. They just don’t have that sense of all this is all the same God. I mean, it’s not that they thought it was a different God, but you know what I’m saying?

Nika >> Yeah, Yeah.

Kay >> It was sort of bracing to them to read through some of the things there.

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> So I really appreciate this book being short. In fact, I may buy it for all of the gals in my group. Some of them didn’t have any problem and some of them did. But I don’t think that’s unusual if you suddenly send somebody into a different part of the Bible that they have never really focused on.

Nika >> Yeah. And I think that’s part of I would always tell people, you know, when you read through, you get people in January, they’re reading through it. If they make it through Leviticus, they’re wandering in Numbers, right? You get and there’s a fatigue that comes. And I actually tell people, I think you’re supposed to, but instead of walking away going, “Wow, God’s really scary, you should walk away going, Wow, people really do bum me out like and I think there’s a fatigue that is actually supposed to be created so that when Jesus comes on the scene, you’re like, Oh, like God came to us.”

But there’s always these moments where I tell people the Old Testament is so surprising when you’re reading through it and like, take Genesis one and two. God gives this lush garden to Adam and Eve. He says, Do anything you want. Just don’t eat from the tree. And of course, they, you know, they go eat from the tree, and God’s like, “Well, all right, we’re going to take you out of Eden.”

And then the most surprising thing to me as you turn the page and he’s right there with them, East of Eden, like he goes with them in exile or, you know, you know, Daniel’s sitting on the riverbank. He’s like, “Bummer, we lost the land.” Like, oh, and then God’s like, I’d let these just those surprises there in Babylon with them.

And so all that to say, I think you’re supposed to be fatigued by humans. There is the way that God’s wrath is described in the Old Testament. It can be fearsome if you don’t understand how Old Testament writing works. But what I would say with people is when Jesus comes on the scene, he’s the visible image of the invisible God.

And so what we actually get to do is we get to take Jesus back into the Old Testament with us. And so it helps us understand those passages better. And so rather than saying, “Oh, Jesus is so different,” we say, “What if I grant that Jesus and the Father are one because of the Trinity?” If the Trinity is distinction, unity and equality, “d”, “u” and “e”, we give God his “due.”

This is in the book. You can guys, this is free. I’ll give it to you now.

Kay >> You don’t have to remember it.

Nika >> Yeah, it’s in the book. Yeah. So distinction. There are three separate members of the three separate persons of the Trinity. We always say personhood, but yet they’re unified. There is one God. We don’t worship a multiplicity of God, and they’re equal.

Even though some of us have a favorite God, we really shouldn’t. There’s one God, right? And so if we will allow the theology of the Trinity inform our Bible reading, suddenly we can say, when I see Jesus come on the scene, his harshest words are for those in power who are oppressing people.

So when I turn around and I take that back to the Old Testament, and suddenly I realize, “Wait a minute, when God is saying this to his own people, it’s because they’re privileged beyond every other nation and they have a special calling.” And also hyperbole is a lot of how God, I tell people nobody talks trash better than God.

When God is talking to the idols and he’s like, “Um. Can he hear you? Is he asleep? Is your idol asleep?” And I always tell people, why would God talk trash about idols? It’s because he knows the idol can’t save you. So if you’re crying out to that piece of wood to save you God is like, “He can’t hear you. He’s a piece of wood.”

And so I say I’ll just say there’s a right fatigue when you go through the Bible, which is what makes God so much better when you realize, man, people really do bum me out and then God never gives up on us. He’s always showing up in the most surprising of places. And that’s part of the “so what” of the Trinity is not just that we recognize they’re united to each other, but when we get to Genesis 1 and we find out we’re made in the image of God, if that’s true that God eternally exists three persons, one essence, which is the simple definition of that God being triune, what does that mean for us as his image bearers?

That means who we are as an individual and who we are as a member of a community have equal ultimately. And for so many of us, we like individualized Christianity. So I actually love that you’re doing the Bible reading in a group because that is very much a “so what” that is born out of the Trinity is we’re meant to do things in community.

And so if your life is not built on self donating loving relationship like the Trinity is, it’s like, Kay, you and I have been around the block. We’ve been pastoring for a while. People will seek after money, sex, fame, you name it, and then they get to the end of themselves and they go, “Huh, this wasn’t satisfying.”

And then the Trinity says, “Well, that’s because you’re made in my image. And so you’re pursuing the wrong things. If you want to be who I made you to be, you have to pursue a healthy, loving relationship.”

And so there’s the Trinity, there’s more practical “So what’s” in the study of the Trinity than I think people realize.

Kay >> I never even thought of it that way til I read your whole book. Oh, things about, you know, about the fact that, you know, we’re designed that way because the Trinity. I mean, I realize that, but anyway, it was good. It was good and practical and very easy to understand it, I think. Although there’s some deep things in it that you might have to read over and over a few times to really grasp it, but overall, it’s only ten pages.

Yeah. You know, it’s not going to be that hard. Yeah.

And I’ll just throw out that I would encourage anybody who wants to read through the Bible and has struggled with it because it probably took me three to five years before I actually made it all the way through the Bible in a year. You don’t have to do it in a year anyway. You’re just putting that on yourself. It’s certainly not necessary.

But do it with a group, even three of you, more than that of you. We’ve got eight in my group and we have somebody who wants to join us late because she just heard about it and she’s so excited. So she’s going to go with us.

But as many times as I’ve read through the Bible, and that’s a lot of times, it’s never been as easy as it is doing it with these other people.

Nika >> And I agree. I mean, that’s where the dissertation work I was doing. So much of the reading habits was because I was this American version of a quiet time, which have gotten really loud actually because people post them on their social media. So I’m like, Well, but this idea of me in the Bible alone with God, certainly there’s nothing wrong with that.

It is exceedingly fruitful for so many people. I meet people all the time, that is their daily habit. Without it, they, you know, they tell me they become monsters. I’ll believe them, right? I’m just like, You don’t have to tell me. Get in the Bible. However, the early church just they read together, there was just communal reading practices and really reading was done out loud.

Even when you read alone until about the ninth century, and so there’s something about auditory, there’s something about doing it with people and there’s something about journeying together that is part of how reading took place.

And again, this is what I mean, you know, everything comes back to the Trinity in my life. You ever have those things are like it’s a little bit like a call, like pickleball. I can bring up pickleball anywhere. I’m like, well, speaking of pickleball, it’s a little bit like, you know, once you love a topic.

So for me, the Trinity, it comes back to this over and over again of this sense of while the Scriptures (it’s such a gift that we have them) like I have probably five Bibles in this room that I’m in right now.

That is a beautiful gift that we have so many English translations, but for the longest time in history, that just wasn’t an option. And literacy was really low for folks as certain parts in history. So people had to read them together. But part of reading it together is the y’alls of Scripture. You realize, “Wait a minute, I can’t even fulfill what I’m being called to do without each other.”

And that’s part of the y’all of the Trinity is you’re not meant to. And so I think so many times in life we burden people with walking with the Lord, but we don’t give them what they need to do it well, which is each other. You know, we say, “We’ll do this and do this and do this.”

And I go, “Yeah, we all know we should wake up and read our Bible every day, but what if you had a group to do it with? And they encouraged you. And then when you had questions, you have a Kay Daigle or I mean, I want to be in this group. I would want to be able to ask you questions any time they came up.”

Like, I cannot tell you the number. My phone goes off at 9 p.m. and people will be like, Where’s Moses body? Or random things that they got doing their Bible. I can always tell in February I’m going to get some wonky little questions because of the Bibles starts out so wonky in a way, but it’s like, what a gift that they can ask people that have.

You know, this is part of what I do. I study the scriptures. And so the Trinity is going to not only impact the way you understand yourself, but it impacts the way we read the Bible. And I think that’s a really beautiful thing that you’re doing.

Kay >> Yeah, well, it’s been great and I know that if I had had somebody encouraging me those first few years, I would have stuck with that better. And I’ve enjoyed that conversation among us because they’ve seen things that I haven’t noticed and I’ve noticed things that they haven’t noticed. You know, it’s so good.

Nika >> I saw this I was there’s this study that was done about the Prodigal Son. So we all know the story pretty well. If you’ve read the Gospels where he demands his, you know, inheritance. His dad gives it to him. He goes away and then he eventually comes back.

So there was a study done where they asked Americans and Russians to write down, how do you remember this story?

And then they asked the question why did he return home? And Americans say, “Well, he spent all his money, so he ran out of money. He came home.”

What’s interesting is the Russians would write, “Oh, the famine (which there is a famine, which I always forget about). There was a famine in the land and nobody cared for him. And they pick up on that because when they’ve had famines. And they think it’s a community responsibility to care for each other. And so they’re like, “Hey, that community kind of failed at that. And he had to go home to his dad.” Of course, as an American, an individualized Western mindset, I’m like, “Well, he was responsible, and that’s why he went home.”

So I think actually both are true, which is why we need each other. He is foolish. That’s part of the story. But then there’s a community piece where the famine makes it where he’s not able to be taken care of.

And those little things, when you’re reading with a mom, when you’re reading with somebody a little bit older, you reading with people who are accountants, versus, you know, I think about Luke, the doctor. He adds in things that have to do with medicine that, you know, that Mark and Matthew don’t. And you think, well, yeah, because he’s a doctor when he writes his gospel. And so the beauty of diversity and all of this is, yeah, it’s just a wonderful gift, which is why if you get this book.

And I do mean that if you get it, one of my goals is to write discussion questions for each day because I’m realizing part of my part I’ve undercut my own value as teaching the Trinity by not making this communal. So at some point I’m going to write discussion questions because again, I want people to study in the context of community.

Kay >> That’d be great. So again, it’s Theology in 10 and you can find that at NikaSpaulding.com.

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> And so they can order it right online, right Nika?

Nika >> Yeah. Easy peasy. It’s NikaSpaulding.com. It’s right up on the website you guys can. The nice thing about my name is you can Google me and you’ll find me. And so if you just type my name and your Google search bar, you’ll be able to find me.

Kay >> Well, speaking of finding you, we have a number of podcasts with Nika that we have done through the years. A lot of different subjects like Justice in the Bible, Lament, Choosing Trustworthy Resources. If you’re responsible to choose resources for your church, maybe your Bible study some sort of curriculum for something. She gives some really great hints on how to do that or if you’re a Bible teacher.

Nika has given us a lot of resources on that. And that’s just a handful of some of the things that she’s talked about. But you can go to our website BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, and you can search for Nika there, and all of those resources will come up.

So Nika, do you have any closing remarks that you want to say?

Nika >> Yeah, I can’t talk about the Trinity without saying this. So one of the things that I want everybody listening to this whether you buy my book or not to understand is when we talk about the Trinity, there’s this big theological thing called inseparable operations, which means that even though sometimes we see one member of the Trinity doing something you should assume they’re all united in that thing.

So I want you all to know that it’s not just Jesus that saves you that the Father authors your salvation Jesus accomplishes and the Spirit applies it. And if any member of the Trinity does not participate in your salvation, you’re not saved. And I don’t say that to scare you. I say that to encourage you that the God that is Triune loves you and save you and cares for you beyond what you can fathom.

And so if you have grown up with a church background where maybe the father was talked about in ways that kind of scare you, or maybe you just grew up with a dad, that makes it hard to understand that you have a loving father. Or maybe you grow up in a church where the Holy Spirit kind of scares you because you saw expressions of it. You thought I was scary a little bit.

I just I want to drive home this point that all three members of the Trinity not only love you, they participate in saving you because they want to bring you home and they want to rescue from sin and death, and they want you to find life in them.

And so that’s what I’d say is like I love theology. I’m a Bible nerd. I can spend all day talking with you. You know this. We love talking about this stuff. There’s not a topic we haven’t brought up. We talk, what should we talk about? Study new things but my heart behind all of this is to convince people that the love of God is so big and it’s more than one member of the Trinity loving you. All three members love you and care for you and save you. And that’s a God worth worshiping. So that’s what I want to leave everybody with.

Kay >> There is no better way to end this. Thanks, Nika.

Nika >> Thanks, Kay.